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Friday, August 2, 2013

You will never how to code. Answer: Bulls**t

Quibb had a thread where you cannot learn to code. I call the notation of people cannot learn bulls**t. I am writing a commentary about how things have changed and why this is the best time to learn coding. There may be a good/bad time for employment, e.g. seasonable. But coding, you can just start now. Why not? It will take some ramp up time.

Few sentences summary about my response: Time has changed, no need to learn coding the old way. Use all the creativities and inventions and get started your own way, fitting to your lifestyle. Then use your newly acquires engineering mind and map out the fast and efficient route to enlightenment, on time.

Pledge to code today. Comment in your resolution at the end of the post.

Looking at the last two conclusions, I must disagree. I think things are really different now. In the past, there aren't great teaching materials for beginners, and for modern web development with a huge line of technologies, libraries and APIs that we can integrate. The task got a whole lot more complex yet the "textbooks" have gotten better and better, especially in the format of online education.

Many of my engineering friends said there is no way to learn programming except for reading the documentation, there is no way to learn code except doing your own project, at least there is no fast way to learn it.

Recently I have also thrust myself in an incredible startup situation where I had to learn Rspec in two days and start writing it ASAP. That actually took the intellectual fun part out of me. It was very stressful, and I realized that I was picking up one thing and missing another, and not doing the fundamentals. I am learning techniques fast, but my engineering thinking didn't get better. Instead, I started to build my own humble website in old ugly static HTML CSS and a bit of PHP. Yet it has been the best jQuery practice ground for me, I spend hours and hours refactoring, forming an opinion, transforming into an advanced coder, integrating backbone.js soon to complete, and soon to add testing.

Doing your own project worked for many, but I don't have a project. I didn't naturally think like a programmer before, when I was a child, I didn't take things apart, but I learn things fast and make impossible logical connections across disciplinary fields. What I realized is that, I just have a very odd learning style.

But as more people learn to program we will encounter all kinds of learning styles. The old way will longer be the way to learn. You no longer have to just read documentations and manuals, now the documentations get better for you (e.g. Angular). Now you no longer just have to program your own, and do a TODOlist, there are many projects, and interactive consoles on the internet.

There is one factor though: time and efficiency: both time and efficiency are really what your conclusions are getting at. We can all learn things, eventually, but how fast and will it be in time for project delivery.

People can learn programming, they will need to start with their style and slowly ramp up, make it into a habit (maybe on Codecademy, maybe reading their favorite book). And the best part : once they start to think more like engineers, they will be more and more efficient at learning, reading books, skimming through, finding documentations, and designing a better route to enlightment.